Who gets to belong?: Contemporary racial struggles, racial language and ideas in the “New African Diaspora” in Germany

• Applicant: Dr. Samsondeen Ajagbe
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552554974

This research project combines sociological models of racialisation and current research in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, specifically as it has evolved in the recent raciolinguistics approach, to study discussions of discrimination, race, and “upward social mobility” within the Nigerian and wider West African immigrant communities in Germany. It aims to study contemporary African migrants and refugees within the African Diaspora paradigm – a diaspora created by the allure of Europe in contrast to the previous ones created by slavery and colonialism – as distinctly different from Afro-Germans who have been the focus of previous research on discrimination, race, and racialisation in Germany. Recent studies on the mobility of Africans striving for socioeconomic stability in Germany often rely on an ethnicity-based approach that classifies individuals according to their ethnic or geographical origins. Consequently, discussions among policymakers and scholars tend to prioritise ethnic factors over racial considerations in understanding the challenges and circumstances of African migrants in Germany. However, race remains an essential factor that Afro-diasporans continue to invoke when accounting for their life in Germany, and especially the stagnant social mobility in the African diasporic community. Therefore, how do members of the “New African Diaspora” community employ “counter-racialization” to resist racism and challenge prevailing racial categories in Germany? The database of the study is the “Corpus of African Race Discourse in Germany” (CARD-G), which combines sociolinguistic interviews from a previous DFG-funded project with follow-up interviews specifically designed for the present study. Overall, the data will provide rich insights into interviewees’ perceptions of race and racism in Germany. The study combines a raciolinguistic perspective (specifically the emergence of terms for racialised groups) with a sociological model that sees racialisation as a two-way process in which African immigrants are “othered” by the resident majority, but also retain agency by resisting this othering through strategies of defensive counterracialisation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants